Control, in or over any or all things, doesn’t mean making them do what you want. Controlling a boat means accepting that you have no control over the overwhelmingly more powerful forces of the wind and waves. Controlling a boat means guiding it in the direction you want to go whether those forces push you in that direction or not.
A charity that doesn’t start with or centre itself around a cause? How could that be? Is it even legally possible under Charity Commission regulations?
What would it do? Anything it wanted to make the world a better place. Think Jukesie’s Squads-as-a-service, able to point a diverse range of charitable skills and expertise at any issue, from fundraising to service delivery.
Perhaps it might mean throwing away the competitive market orientated notion of charities competing for scare resources where one of the checks a new charity has to do is to make sure another charity isn’t already doing what you want to do (not whether they are actually being effective), but this wouldn’t be a problem for a cause-agnostic charity.
Then, rather than the moral question of whether a charity should being trying to make itself unnecessary, and what the implications of that might be for the people that work for that charity, the question for all cause-agnostic charities is, what’s the biggest, worst, most urgent problem facing our world, society, community, town, village.
Remote working is a fantastic thing that brings benefits to individuals, families, organisations, and society, but it isn’t without its challenges.
Remote working adds a layer of abstraction to everything everyone does, a layer that requires interpretation by everyone else. When people are co-located they can communicate more deeply with body language, social cues, etc, and if someone wants to see someone else’s work they can walk over to them and look at their monitor. Video calls and screen sharing may make us feel closer to the real life versions but its important we remember and account for the abstraction those technologies introduce.
If everyone has a choice between reducing salary and working hours to 80% or accepting furlough; no work and 80% salary paid by the government, how does the organisation ensure that the right number of people choose the first option to ensure that work can still be done, and option two which saves the organisation money?
How, as an individual, can you know which is the right choose, which is better for the greater good? Should you accept furlough, save the organisation money but not achieve anything, or accept reduced hours to still accomplish things for the organisation?
This week I was doing:
I’ve been working on a product strategy for a new product. I’m keen that the strategy aligns on multiple levels; helping the programme achieve its goals, improves capabilities across the organisation (Communication, notification, surveying and reporting), and aligning with the technology strategy and roadmap.
Two of the most interesting things I read around product strategy were ‘What is product strategy? and ‘What is good product strategy?’, from which I particularly like Melissa’s description of having a target state and having to work your way across unknown territory from the current state. It fits with our approach to product strategy of moving towards different target states on different levels.
One of the products I’ve been working on has changed proposition from being about showcasing real world activities and encouraging young people to sign-up, to providing supportive messaging about how the Trust can help young people and encouraging them to make contact. The new proposition has required the content to be rewritten to be more authoritative and trustworthy. It’s interesting how important content is for a product like this to succeed.
I set up a website at future.charity. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it but it’s going to be some kind of thought experiment about what a charity of the future might look like.
This week I was studying:
I finished my last assignment for this term. Although my least favourite it was actually quite interesting. My argument was around how liberal market economies were deregulated as a means of trying to increase firm productivity through introducing supply and demand mechanisms to the labour market but failed, resulting instead in firms adopting more low-road human resource management policies to reduce cost and so increase performance.
This week I was thinking about:
Lockdown has become very much part of life. There’s no going out to beaches at the weekend, even going shopping seems like a major mission, and perhaps the hardest thing is not knowing how long it will last. Thinking about my roadmap for this year seems more difficult under such constraining conditions. There are definitely plenty of things I want to do with my website, but I’m not sure that feels like enough of an achievement for a year.
This week people were tweeting about:
I spent almost no time on Twitter this week. A combination of being busy at work, writing my assignment, stuff in my personal life, and Twitter being all about Coronavirus, just made me not bother with it.
I started future.charity, a thought experiment on what charity might look like in the future. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be or do, but I’m ok with that purpose emerging as we go along.
I set up the website, email list, and Twitter account. One of my ideas is to pose questions about how the future of things within a charity, such as governance, fundraising and marketing.
“We need long term thinking now more than ever” by Melissa Gates https://link.medium.com/S5A8a50Nk5